Each semester, undergraduate students at UIC Business have a variety of opportunities to connect with executives from local, national, and international firms. One of the most popular opportunities by sheer attendance numbers is Professor Michael Miller’s Executives in the Classroom series, which kicks off for the fall semester next Thursday, October 6, with a visit from Aaron Wetzel of John Deere & Co. Wetzel will meet with a small group of management students in the morning, followed by an 11 a.m. presentation for UIC Business students that will include a SWOT analysis by students of Wetzel’s Deere division and a discussion with Wetzel about Deere strategy and his own career as a manager.

The Executives in the Classroom series is just one component of Miller’s approach to teaching management. As he told the UIC Business blog last spring, there’s a limit to what you can expose students to in the classroom, which is why Miller supplements these executive visits with trips to meet managers in their places of work. In recent years, Miller has taken his students to Southwestern Airlines in Dallas, to Mercury Marine in Fond du Lac, to Caterpillar here in Illinois, and most recently to John Deere headquarters in the Quad Cities, a visit which Deere is repaying with Wetzel’s trip to UIC.

Other Executives in the Classroom this semester include D.G. Macpherson of Grainger, Inc., Brian McCaskey of the Chicago Bears, Robert Mariano of Roundy’s, Inc., and Don Hermanek of Insurance Auto Auctions. In recent semesters, Miller has hosted Sam Zell, Jenny Zhao, BS '88, Selim Bassoul, Jill Smart, Arthur Velasquez, and Michael Fung, BS '73, each of whom gave UIC Business students unique management perspective and valuable career guidance, and in the cases of Fung and Zhao, discussed their own personal connections to UIC.